American Music Review

Vol. XLIII, No. 2, Spring 2014

Institute News

Jeffrey Taylor, CUNY Brooklyn College & Graduate Center

We are delighted to welcome Elizabeth Keenan as our Guest Editor for this special issue, devoted to women
and popular music. Elizabeth completed her doctorate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University in 2008.
She is writing her first book, Popular Music, Cultural Politics, and the Third Wave Feminist Public, which investigates
cultural politics and identity-based movements in US popular music since 1990. She has published in Women and
Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Current Musicology, has presented her research at a variety
of conferences, and writes a regular column for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae website, and teaches
music history at Fordham University. Elizabeth was a guest of the Institute in spring 2011, when she delivered
the talk "Riot Grrrl Is Dead. Long Live Riot Grrrl: Political Activism, Nostalgia, and Historiography." It has
been a pleasure working with her on this important publication.

Rafi Malkiel, Anat Cohen, and Arturo O’Farrill in rehearsal with the Brooklyn College Big Band. Photo by Jeffrey Taylor

A highlight of our spring offerings was a special concert
on 15 May, celebrating the Latin/Jewish connection in
jazz. Our guests were clarinetist Anat Cohen, trombonist
and euphonium player Rafi Malkiel, and pianist Arturo
O'Farrill, with the Brooklyn College Big Band. The
performance featured compositions and arrangements by
O'Farrill, Malkiel, and others, and brought the enthusiastic
Whitman Hall audience to its feet. The event was filmed
by the College's Department of TV/Radio, to be
broadcast on CUNY's cable TV channel. By the way,
Professor O'Farrill will be joining the Conservatory of
Music as a full-time faculty member and ISAM Associate
this fall. More on that in our next issue!

Our May jazz concert was preceded by a series of
talks and lecture/performances that covered a wide variety of topics. In February, Elizabeth Wollman spoke on
"Hair and the Gender Politics of Late-1960s Youth Culture" (see her contribution to the current issue). In April,
"Singing the Gods: Songs of Devotion, Praise, and Invocation in Brooklyn" brought together Brooklyn-based
artists from Brazil, Morocco, India and the Caribbean in a celebration of both the contrasts and commonalities
in world sacred music traditions. And in May composer and saxophonist Dan Blake offered some thought-provoking
ideas (gleaned largely from personal experience) about the process of improvisation in experimental music.

It was a busy term for the Institute, but our staff still continued to pursue personal research, composition,
and performing projects. Graduate Fellow Whitney George guest-conducted the Low Brass Connection for a
concert series in Germany and Holland titled "Sounds After the Oil War," premiering her new work for trombone
choir "Carelessly Open, Something Unsaid, the Phone off the Hook." In May, she conducted her tenth consecutive
concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of the CUNY Graduate Center titled "Exquisite Corpse" featuring
new works by emerging New York women composers, in addition to selections from Gideon's "Sonnets from Shakespeare." The coming year will see her at work on a variety of new commissions, as well as conducting additional performances of her works.

Besides performing the vocal solo in the Gideon piece mentioned above, Research Associate Stephanie
Jensen-Moulton continued her work on American opera and disability this spring, with a lecture at Eastman
School of Music on Einstein on the Beach ("Disability as Postmodernism") and a presentation of her work on
Jake Heggie's opera Moby-Dick at the annual meeting of the Society for Disability Studies. This summer, she
will speak on a panel about women composers associated with the Sylvia Milo's play "The Other Mozart" here
in New York City, an event organized by composer/sound designer Nathan Davis.

Director Jeffrey Taylor continues his research and writing on player pianos and popular music of the 1920s,
as well as the music of Pharoah Sanders, and this past April was joined by HISAM Advisory Board member
Judith Tick for a talk about Ella Fitzgerald and her arrangers, prior to a concert by the Smithsonian Masterworks
Orchestra at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts. Finally, congratulations to Senior Research Associate
Ray Allen, who will begin a year-long sabbatical this fall during which he will continue work on his current
book project tentatively titled Jump Up: West Indian Carnival Music in Brooklyn.